The encounters I have with creepy men and shitty lovers are tragic for their normalcy, shattering the image of sexual freedom and power that I imagine with the help of Wizkid’s music. My experiences, in which my inflated expectations are met with, at best, indifference toward my pleasure and, at worst, the denial of it, confirm that the real world has not caught up to the worlds we can create in music. I consider two options. One is to throw away the music, believe nothing, trust no one. Another is to see the contradiction as instructive, for if I can’t imagine pleasure, how will I know when it’s real?

In time I look beyond myself, searching for critics who have more precise language on the subject; who have elaborated on the gap between the imaginative agency that popular music offers to women and the physical realities that take it away. I find helpful language in the work of Ann Powers, who, writing on rock, cites the “always partial and precarious” erotic freedom that many women, and young people in general, have experienced through rock and roll. “As great as it feels for a girl to let the noise and rhythm surge through her body,” she says, “that body still moves within a world where others wield all kinds of weapons to contain you.” Itching for parallel analyses in genres I feel closer to, I look to the work of Joan Morgan and the journalist Akoto Ofori-Atta, the latter of whom writes of the “gray area” that abounds in the hearts of Black women who love hip-hop, of the “contradictions of loving an art that is reluctant to include you; loving men who, at times, refuse to portray you in your totality; and rejecting sexual objectification while actively and proudly embracing your sexuality.”